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Cooperation at Innovation Park brings support for businesses

Cooperation at Innovation Park brings support for businesses

December 01, 2009|Gene Stowe Tribune Correspondent

The opening of Innovation Park at Notre Dame signals an unprecedented level of collaboration between the university and South Bend, including businesses and professional services. Park officials and local providers are fashioning an innovative model for the cooperation, they say, with a goal of ensuring mutual success for the Park and the community that both includes and transcends individual business-client relationships. Few if any other tech parks enjoy the array of opportunities that the combination of Innovation Park and Ignition Park affords, and Innovation Park plans an unusually hands-on approach to providing support teams for clients. “We aspire to be more of a client service-based operation than a landlord,” says Ann Hastings, Innovation Park’s marketing manager. “We want to be sure companies coming into Innovation Park are ready to be engaged. “They have to be willing to engage with the people we bring around them. We’re trying to develop ways to match potential clients with the right people who can help them accelerate their business.” The needed expertise in fields from marketing to law to finance will come sometimes from the local community and sometimes from specialists elsewhere, including Notre Dame alumni. “We’re not Silicon Valley,” Hastings says. “We’re not Boston. There will be local and regional people. There will also be people we need to patch in from other sources. We’re trying to develop a model that is sustainable for our specific environment.” Rich Hill of the Baker & Daniels law firm, which entered discussions with Innovation Park CEO David Brenner long before construction started on the building, says the partnership is a long-term proposition. “I think David and his staff have done a great job reaching out into the community,” he says. “We have tried to take a role to let David know we’re able and willing to invest efforts there. “Is there going to be a client to have at the end of this road? Our perspective is a much longer-term view. If we have it being nurtured there at Innovation Park, we want to make sure that is the kind of thing that will stay in the community.” To organize support, the Park, which is a nonprofit organization, has created the Innovation Partners program where companies offer financial support to the Park and their experience and expertise to clients while providing important referrals. “These are businesses who already have established track records of helping start-ups and working with businesses in this region and can help us find the right people,” Hastings says. “The Innovation Partners program is extremely important for the Park. It’s part of a suite of services and resources we hope to offer to our clients.” In return for a financial commitment, Innovation Partners gain marketing exposure, including on the Park’s Web site; participation at events and forums as well as access to future clients. Leaders expect that client companies in the Park will include innovators and entrepreneurs drawn from the University’s faculty, student, or alumni community, as well as outside ventures that can benefit from access to expertise and resources available through the Park. 1st Source Bank is offering financial counseling and mentoring to clients as part of its partnership with the Park. “We have an opportunity here especially with Notre Dame’s focus on graduate research and its connection to the world,” says Chris Murphy, the bank’s chairman and CEO. “We have the opportunity to have things happen around here that have never happened before.” Among other things, research could bring innovations in longstanding regional industries such as prosthetics and RVs that would make them more competitive and profitable. The bank has seen the economic impact of a similar, small-scale project in Fort Wayne, says Murphy, who graduated from Notre Dame in 1968. “It’s led to the development of businesses,” he says. “We want that to happen here.” Baker & Daniels helped sponsor and organize a symposium on legal and ethical issues with respect to nanotechnology and nanoresearch earlier this year. Another seminar is scheduled for next May, on legal definitions of nano products that can significantly affect their regulation — for example, whether a product is a drug or a medical device. “It’s really identifying the university as being the thought leader on these kinds of issues,” Hill says. “Notre Dame and the larger community are going to be establishing the reputation of being where things are happening. “I think it’s going to take collaboration and thinking and working together. We expect to be out there at Innovation Park supporting the work that’s going on.” Phil Faccenda Jr., nanotechnology practice group chair at the Barnes & Thornburg law firm, another early partner of the Park, says the firm has worked with similar sites connected to Purdue University and Indiana University. “We’ve seen the advantage of these technology parks,” he says. We want to support this. It will be for the betterment of everybody in our community.”